Red Barber Looks Back
By Red Barber
Originally published in Florida Living’s January 1985 issue
In my years of big league broadcasting, I got to know hundreds of ball players, including Satchel Paige. Old Satch, supposed to be 43 when he joined Cleveland in 1948, was both a pitcher and a philosopher. (I don’t think anybody ever really knew his age.)
Had Branch Rickey broken the color line 25 years sooner, Satchel would have put records in the book that would be unbelievable. As a grass roots philosopher he would say such things as, “Don’t never look back, ’cause something might be gaining on you.”
For the purposes of this retrospect, I’ll have to differ with Old Satch. An axiom is like a coin–it has two sides. Yes, one is wise not to worry over what has happened, but also one is wise to remember where he came from and how he arrived where he is.
I finished high school in Sanford, down in Central Florida, in 1926. The Florida Boom was on and jobs were plentiful. I had no idea what I wanted to be. College never entered my mind and there wasn’t any money in the family to even discuss it. I went to work. In 1927 the boom burst. Jobs were hard to find and when you got one it was day-labor at $2 a day, and a full day, too. All day – no eight hour stuff.
The last job I had in Sanford was in the summer of 1928. It was helping a man put on built-up roofs. I kept the fire roaring under the barrel of pitch. I carried buckets of the boiling pitch up the ladder to the man on the roof. The sun blazed down. I’m not afraid of the torments of hell – not after that summer.
I got hot enough to do some hard thinking. I would soon be 21, high school education only, no training for anything, and all I had to offer was a willingness to work. I didn’t know what 1 wanted to study but I figured I’d be better off at the University of Florida working my way. I sure wasn’t going anywhere in Sanford.
Andrew Caraway and I had been in high school together. He was going back to Gainesville for his third year – and he had a Ford with a rumble seat. I rode the rumble. My clothes were stuffed into a canvas duffel bag. I had about $100. Registration was the next day. State boys then didn’t have to pay tuition or I wouldn’t have been there.
It was a new world. That first night I wandered around the campus, trying to evaluate it. The climate was friendly. The few buildings seemed to say, “Welcome.” There was space, grass and pine trees. Students spoke as they passed. I learned it was the custom to speak to everyone you met whether you knew him or not. When I say “him,” I mean “him.” Florida then was all-male, and there were about 2,000 of us in 1928.
From the open windows of the fraternity and rooming houses came music. This was still the era of the phonograph record-Gene Austin, (and if you don’t know who Gene Austin was, he was the hottest singer on recordings then, or now) broke all records, and as Casey Stengel would say, “And you can look it up!” There were Betty Boop and Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.
Back then you had songs with melody, and singers who sang words you could understand.
For that first night in a strange town. Andrew, my Sanford friend and transportation chief, got me a bed in his fraternity house – on my income a fraternity was never considered.
As I started to go for registration I ran into another Sanford boy, Leonard McLucas, who was a senior. Leonard said, “What college are you going to enter?” I said I didn’t know they had colleges, that I was just going to go to the university. He asked if I wanted engineering, chemistry, liberal arts? I said I didn’t have any idea. Then he said, “Times are hard and they are going to get harder. Jobs are scarce. Enroll in Teacher’s College. At least you’ll get a job teaching when you graduate. Most of the boys getting out of law school are pumping gas in filling stations.”
I enrolled in the School of Education. The first day took most of my money: student tuition fees, room-and meals for a month in the dormitory (Thomas Hall next to Buckman), shoes for the ROTCand books.
I was ‘in’ for a month. The rest of the way was up to me.
Most of the boys were looking for jobs, and the best job was waiting tables in return for your meals. No tips. These jobs had long been spoken for, but sometimes a fellow would want to leave for the weekend and you could substitute.
The Dean of Men, B. A. Tolbert, taught a class I attended, and he got me odd jobs at 35¢ an hour stacking fireplace wood, hoeing grass in tennis courts. Once he got me a job managing an old lady’s rooming house -which paid meals and room, but it lasted only two months until she decided to close down and leave town.
Professor Burritt in the School of Architecture, for whom I stacked wood, took me in for a week until my English professor, Hampton Jarrell, let me use a spare room in his apartment. By then my grades were high enough to get me a job in the stack room of the university library at 3S¢ an hour, with no bonus for the dust.
By paying my dues my freshman year I was in line for a fulltime job waiting tables at Ma Trumperís when school opened in the fall of 1929. That summer, between sessions, back in Sanford, I worked full time for the Department of Agriculture (there was a Mediterranean fruit fly scare). My dad said I was welcome at home and he wouldn’t take any money from me. Knowing how tough it would be in Gainesville I deposited every check I got – never took out a dollar. Two weeks before I was to go back to school the First National Bank of Sanford closed its doors. I got back to Gainesville again with $l00-but with Ma Trumper’s job waiting for me.
Jerry Carter, Jr. – his dad was Hotel Commissioner – and I rented a small apartment. I knew I couldn’t stay there very long. I was walking down University Avenue, and here came Wallace Goebel, my professor in social science. He asked if I had an idea of anybody who would be janitor for the University Club, a two-story house across from the campus, where a half dozen bachelor professors had their rooms. I told Goebel he was talking to him.
That did it. I had meals and a room that cost nothing but my time. There was no way I could be dislodged.
Today, people don’t know what the Great Depression was. It hit Florida first. My second year in college, 1929, the stock market broke. By mid-November stocks dropped 228 points from September, and this would be much worse the next year, down to 58 in July. In three years, General Motors went from 73 to 8, U. S. Steel from 262 to 22, and Montgomery Ward from 138 to 4.
Some 7,000 banks crashed. Millions of men were out of work. Millions. At one time 100,000 men every week were fired. People lost their homes, farmers their land.
I was fortunate – room and meals and the ROTC uniform, if I chose to wear it. I carried 21 hours. I wanted to finish in three years and one summer session. I came to school as a day laborer. I was never a rah-rah boy.
One of the professors. at the University Club was Ralph Fulghum. He was in the School of Agriculture and had the assignment of putting on a 45-minute farm program at noon on the campus radio station, WRUF. I had returned early from 1929 Christmas vacation, school wasn’t in session and Ma Trumper’s wasn’t open. Ralph walked in and asked me to go to the radio station with him and read a l0-minute paper that a professor had written but then had to leave town. I said I was too busy. He asked me again and I told him again I wasn’t interested, that I hadn’t lost a thing at the radio station. Ralph said, “I’ll buy your dinner if you’ll do it. Off I led him to his car.
I was seated behind a carbon microphone and told to start when I was given a signal. I read the paper, left the studio and started to leave. A man stopped me and said, “Did you just read that paper?”
I said, ‘Yes” and began walking out.
He said, “Wait a minute – I’m Major Powell, the director of the station. I’m new here, and I need a part-time student announcer at 35¢ an hour.”
I told him I wasn’t interested. He asked why. I told him I didn’t have time: 21 hours of classes, job at Ma Trumper’s, a job as janitor-and, furthermore I wasn’t interested. I left.
About once a week Fulghum would say that Major Powell wanted me to come out to WRUF and go to work, and I’d tell Fulghum to tell Powell I wasn’t coming out – that I was too busy – had my hard-earned security – knew nothing about radio and wasn’t interested in trying to find out anything about it. One day Fulghum got mad. He said that he was sick and tired of being between Major Powell and me, and that dad gum it, it was up to me to get Major Powell off his cotton-picking back. I said I would.
I went to the station in the afternoon. I explained over again my status: no time, 21 hours, Ma Trumper’s, room at the University Club, how hard I’d worked to get this security, and how hard times were, and that I could not take a 35¢ an hour job as a gamble. Major Powell said, “How much a month will I have to guarantee you to come to WRUF?”
I thought I had him. I thought, “I’ll ask for so much money he can’t pay it, and then he’ll leave me and Fulghum alone. I added up quickly: for $30 a month I can eat…$l0 a month for a room …$5 a month for laundry and extra money … I’ll ask him for $50 a month.” I did.
Major Powell said, “Okay, you start tomorrow.”
Just like that – my complete security was gone. I walked back to my room slower than a man going to the gallows. I nearly cried when I told Ma Trumper goodbye. I’d worked so hard to get established, and in one moment I’d thrown it all away. What did I know about radio? How did I know I could make the grade?
But I’d named the terms. On March 4, 1930, I became a professional announcer. Here late in 1984 I’m still broadcasting.
Of course, Satchel, I have to look back.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection
(Florida Monthly occasionally publishes older articles on this blog as a way to look back at where we’ve been. To see more, click the Looking Back tag)
